For three mixed chamber ensembles. Performed by Slee Sinfonietta. Image by Megan Metté.

A Sunless Room [2014]

Performed by <a href="http://www.ensemble-surplus.com">Ensemble SurPlus</a> at <a href="http://www.music21c.org/index.php/june-in-buffalo">June in Buffalo 2010</a>: Sven-Thomas Kiebler (conductor), Martina Roth (flute), Christian Kemper (oboe), Erich Wagner (clarinet), Steffan Hausler (violin), Thomas Avery (viola), Beverly Ellis (cello), Johannes Nied (bass).

In the summer of 2009 I moved to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo,_ny">Buffalo, New York</a>, a city whose iconic postindustrial ruins are an integral part of its geographical and psychological landscape. Buffalo’s broken structures are distorted and distended, buried and rotting under layers of dirt, rust, and other scars. Although the romanticism of urban decay is to some a particularly tired cliché, it, like de Kooning’s women, calls conventions of beauty into question. The frightening beauty of a ruined edifice, as opposed to the clean, fresh sensuality of a newly built structure, is the kind that has lived, changed, and reacted to its world and to time, a momenti mori for we the inhabitants.
I was not concerned with any of these things when I began to write this piece; its true beginnings were in more abstract musical issues. However, as I was writing and listening to the sound material, I couldn’t help but imagine myself inside one of the crumbling houses or churches that I pass every day. The sounds of the piece took on an architectural quality, becoming the beams, bricks, plaster, and stone, and I felt as if I were witnessing a time-lapse image of the building’s collapse while inside of it.
Like much of my recent music, The Ruined Edifice is in two complementary halves. The first half, whose only descriptive marking is “monolithic and unstable,” uses sounds that add noise, distortion, and dirt to cover and bury the original instrumental tone. The second half, whose descriptive marking is “dustlike,” subtracts the original instrumental tone to reveal the dust and artifacts that it had buried.


The Ruined Edifice [2010]

Performed by <a href="http://www.talujon.com/">Talujon Percussion Quartet</a>: Michael Lipsey (conductor), Tom Kolor, David Kossin, Matt Ward, Dominic Donato.

<i>Scape After Louise</i> was inspired by the sculptures of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Nevelson">Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)</a>. Nevelson is famous for her huge wooden assemblages, each consisting of a network of boxes or grids. Within each box there are a set of found objects whose shape and characteristics remain consistent, but whose order, size, and permutation are changed in each box. Upon first seeing the work in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, I was thrilled by how a work so rigidly structured and static could explode with so much inner life and vitality. Though the sculptures stood still and monolithic, it seemed as if inside they were in a constant state of fluid and amorphous movement.

My goal in this work was to not only translate aesthetic logic of Nevelson’s work into a musical form, but to translate my experience of looking at the work itself — the way my eyes perceived the work and the way it is interpreted in my mind. Like Nevelson’s sculptures, the piece contains four different sonic objects that are grouped into four different “panels.” The first movement, “Dusk: Squaring the Circle” is more objective, consisting of a gradual focusing and zooming-in upon the panels; at first each panel is audible individually, then each group of objects, then each individual object by itself. It is akin to (aurally) moving ever-closer towards the work, viewing it from its broad totality to its finest detail.

In the second movement, “Dawn: Reassemblages,” the artwork is reconstructed in my subjective mind. As my mind begins to reconstruct the work from the smallest details to the full picture, the individual objects take on new meanings and personalities. They are no longer tightly bound by the grid of the work, but are free to transform, interact, and to take on unexpected traits and meanings. 

Scape After Louise -- I. Dusk (Squaring the Circle) [2009-10]

Performed by <a href="http://www.talujon.com/">Talujon Percussion Quartet</a>: Michael Lipsey (conductor), Tom Kolor, David Kossin, Matt Ward, Dominic Donato.

<i>Scape After Louise</i> was inspired by the sculptures of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Nevelson">Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)</a>. Nevelson is famous for her huge wooden assemblages, each consisting of a network of boxes or grids. Within each box there are a set of found objects whose shape and characteristics remain consistent, but whose order, size, and permutation are changed in each box. Upon first seeing the work in Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, I was thrilled by how a work so rigidly structured and static could explode with so much inner life and vitality. Though the sculptures stood still and monolithic, it seemed as if inside they were in a constant state of fluid and amorphous movement.

My goal in this work was to not only translate aesthetic logic of Nevelson’s work into a musical form, but to translate my experience of looking at the work itself — the way my eyes perceived the work and the way it is interpreted in my mind. Like Nevelson’s sculptures, the piece contains four different sonic objects that are grouped into four different “panels.” The first movement, “Dusk: Squaring the Circle” is more objective, consisting of a gradual focusing and zooming-in upon the panels; at first each panel is audible individually, then each group of objects, then each individual object by itself. It is akin to (aurally) moving ever-closer towards the work, viewing it from its broad totality to its finest detail.

In the second movement, “Dawn: Reassemblages,” the artwork is reconstructed in my subjective mind. As my mind begins to reconstruct the work from the smallest details to the full picture, the individual objects take on new meanings and personalities. They are no longer tightly bound by the grid of the work, but are free to transform, interact, and to take on unexpected traits and meanings.

Scape After Louise -- II. Dawn (Reassemblages) [2009-2010]

Recorded by Marja Kerney (Percussion), Steven Schob (percussion), Roger Caliman (percussion), Nick Baker (Percussion), Wah Hei Ng (violin), Lauren Wells (violin), Timothy Eshing (viola), Jonathan Carbin (cello).

The Slow Splintering loosely follows the sonic and physical trajectory of glass shattering — an initial explosion, a cracking and fissuring, a breaking apart into shards, and the settling of those shards — in slow motion, taking place over 12 minutes and 24 seconds.

The Slow Splintering [2008]

Tower of Babel [2007]

Performed by <a href="http://www.ensemble-linea.com">Ensemble Linea</a> live at <a href="http://www.music21c.org/index.php/june-in-buffalo">June in Buffalo 2011</a>: Jean-Philipe Wurtz (conductor), Keiko Murakami (flute), Andrea Nagy (clarinet), Reto Staub (piano), Maiko Matsuoka (violin), Johannes Burghoff (cello).

Akin to a flip book’s slow progression, but encompassing a radical change of a scene’s perspective along with the development of action, Year Without Summer (Daumenkino) develops several recent ideas in my work: the structure of music as a series of successive cells or frames (in the visual or cinematic sense), and combinations of multiple, rapidly changing sonorities. In this piece, a five-note phrase is reiterated persistently while very gradually transforming rhythmically and registrally.  In contrast, each phrase contains jarring, rapid, and abrupt changes in orchestration and sound combinations. The piece’s dichotomy of repetition and slow, continuous changes versus a lively and active surface creates an at-times uncomfortable middle ground between a traditional, linear listening experience and a more meditative, moment-to-moment experience. In a further thematic continuation of some of my recent music, the title is a playful allusion to the infamous climate of my current home: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo,_ny">Buffalo, NY</a>.

Year Without Summer (Daumenkino) [2011]

"Animals moan and lurk behind my flatted notes; One note is just enough for something." -- Andy Costello

Ornamental Alphabets was written for Andy Costello, Weston Olencki, and Beth McDonald of the Morton Feldman Chamber Players, as part of a program of short works by young composers inspired by (or against) Feldman's music and legacy. 

This short work is a series of five panels, each of which is identical in length. The first four are very similar, but the fifth differs more substantially. It was inspired by F. Delmontte's Book of Ornamental Alphabets, Ancient and Mediæval, from the 8th-17th Centuries.  

Ornamental Alphabets [2015]

As a child, I first learned to consciously adjust the focus of my eyes by staring at my backyard through the mesh screen on the kitchen window. To my delight, I found that I could impose an even, orderly grid onto the world, and then with the slightest movement of my eyes, make the screen fade away to a smooth and unbroken world. Tiny muscular adjustments could radically shift my perspective from a world that is sliced into constrained, equal bits into one that is boundless and uninterrupted. In Mesh Mask, constant tremolos and hand alternations create a screen of fast, discrete attacks that obscure slow and continuous changes in harmony and register. From time to time, the focus shifts and the screen is ruptured, allowing the material behind it to poke through and assert itself in varying degrees.

Mesh Mask is dedicated to Matilda Ertz, who premiered the work at 21C in Louisville, KY in March 2012.

Mesh Mask [2012]

The first canon of J.S. Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is known as a “crab” canon: two voices play the famous theme and its elaboration simultaneously, one moving forward from beginning to end, the other backwards, running in reverse. They meet in the middle, exchange direction, and return to their original starting points, at which they repeat the process ad infinitum. The work is thus a Möbius Strip, possessing a moment of initiation, but no clear beginning or ending; it is a music that nullifies the arrow of time, presenting the past, present, and future simultaneously at each moment.

Canons in Entropy, commissioned by Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest and the SONICBernheim Series, is a site-specific 4-channel audio installation that uses the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester’s recording of Bach’s crab canon as its source material, both sonically and conceptually. Just as Bach constructs the work by layering the music upon itself, I proliferate this layering in an accretive process: after I present the original recording as Bach had composed it, I splice the recording in half at the midpoint and layer the two halves atop each other. I then splice it in thirds and do the same, then in fourths, fifths, and so forth, a total of 231 times. The music undergoes entropy, as its conventionally “musical” qualities — melodies, rhythms, harmonies, instrumental attacks, etc. — are eroded to a liquefied, homogenized stasis. Over the course of 11 minutes, what began as an awe-inspiring example of human sonic construction begins to bear more resemblance sound as it’s found “in the wild”: the roar of wind, the hum of insects, the enveloping din of a flock of birds. Just as Bach inverts the music in his canon’s center for it to return, symmetrically, to its starting point, so do I begin to reconstitute Canons in Entropy from its molten endpoint back to the original recording so that the cycle can perpetuate endlessly.

At Bernheim Forest, the speakers that played back the work were placed between four Norwegian fir trees along a wooden path between the parking lot and the Visitors Center. As the sounds rotated across the four speakers in various circular patterns, listeners could experience the piece from multiple vantage points and proximities. Though the stereo mix on this page presents a version of the piece from a fixed distance, listeners’ constant movements and shifts in perspective with regard to the sound sources — from close to far, centered to angled — are integral to the work’s sonic experience and its integration in Bernheim Forest’s environment. 

Special thanks to Aaron Rosenblum, Sara Soltau, Andrea Jane, and Claude Stephens for their organizational, technical, financial, and moral support, and for their innumerable contributions to sustaining adventurous art in the Louisville, KY region. 

Jacob Gotlib

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks